You like the thought of hand lettering and calligraphy. However, if your penmanship is awkward, how do you spruce up and improve your handwriting so that you can produce hand lettering art you’re proud of?
You’re definitely not alone in the bad handwriting category. Many individuals struggle with their penmanship and want to spruce up their handwriting as an adult. The great news? You can practice and enhance your handwriting starting today.
In this post, we’ll explore 6 actions to improve your handwriting as an adult, consisting of:
- Analyzing Your Handwriting
- Composing More
- Focusing on Consistency
- Experimenting with Writing Utensils
- Teaching Yourself Calligraphy
- Practicing (a LOT)
Why Do You Want to Improve Your Handwriting as an Adult
Possibly you’re looking to monetize your hand lettering hobby, or perhaps you just want to have the ability to send out a handwritten thank you note that appears like it was written by an adult.
If your handwriting is illegible or looks like a 5-year old did it, you may even be experiencing judgment from colleagues.
Improving your handwriting will not just make your composing clear, it will likewise cause self-confidence in your work. As a result, you’ll also be taken more seriously.
And if you’re on this site, chances are you might want to improve your coordination so you can use your penmanship to:
- Produce a bullet journal that is post-worthy
- Master your hand lettering abilities
- Have more hand control when drawing
- Develop your illustrative skills
Improving your handwriting does take LOTS of practice, specifically focused practice. Most significantly, you will require to slow down– even the very best hand letterers and calligraphers take their time when working on their craft!
Step 1: Analyze Your Handwriting
Before you can improve your handwriting, you are initially required to do a complete audit of your writing. Sounds boring, right? But it’s actually quite interesting!
Compose a paragraph or two on paper by copying some text out of a book or from your phone. The more you write, the more you’ll have the ability to see patterns (bad and good). Take your time, however, also attempt to compose at your regular rate. Sometimes your pen strokes change when you write faster and you might take shortcuts that you want to fix.
Once you’re done, you can start to examine some features of your composing that you wish to improve:
- Spacing: Spacing in between letters need to correspond, and spacing in between words need to also match up!
- Slant: Does the slant of your letters match, or is it all over the location, tilting left and then tilting?
- Style: Are your letters formed the same or does your style go all over the place?
- Height of letters: The heights of the lower case letters ought to all compare and exactly the same with upper case letters.
- Consistent baseline for letters: Do your words line up on the bottom, or does it bounce around and go astray?
- Closing counters: I’m absolutely guilty of this one … when hurrying, do you leave your O’s or A’s or comparable letters open?
- Dotting your i’s: Do you dot your i’s? Do you cross your T’s?
Step 2: Enhance Your Handwriting by Writing More
Our hand muscles for drawing and writing are going unused! If you don’t have a regular practice, you’re going to have a harder time writing neatly.
Taking 10-15 minutes every day to compose nicely and gradually can greatly improve your handwriting. Arrange time into your calendar to write a page or 2 (like right after a meal or when you awaken). Compose as nicely as you can, about anything. Perhaps even kill two birds with one stone by keeping a day-to-day handwritten journal.
I personally have actually handled to vastly enhance my handwriting as an adult by journaling and keeping in mind on my iPad Pro.
Step 3: Focus on Consistency to Spruce up Your Handwriting
Consistency is essential. No matter what design you practice of your own handwriting, whether it’s cursive or not, you want to find a set of letter styles that you like to compose and that look good together.
Practice with varying slopes and angles, heights of your letters, the roundness of letters, etc. When you begin to see a design pattern in your handwriting, practice the very same letter over and over again (actually fill one page with a’s and then the next with b’s) up until you start to feel comfortable.
For slants, you can even produce your own angled calligraphy guide and location it under your paper to practice.
Step 4: Try out Pens and Writing Utensils to Make the Most of Your Handwriting Improvement
There are apparently numerous brand names and types of pens and composing utensils readily available. It depends on you to find the style of pen that works best for the level of control, line choice, pressure, and density you prefer.
For example, some gel pens are too slippery and move too quickly. An extremely great pen might not work for somebody with a heavy hand. More affordable ballpoint pens may be clumpy and untidy.
For standard handwriting, I choose fine felt tip markers over any other kind of writing utensil since they offer more friction on the paper and help me slow down. You can even practice with an old fashioned # 2 pencil in order to help you decrease to improve your handwriting.
Recently, my favourite pens for gorgeous handwriting include:
- The Pilot G2 for quicker writing on more textured paper
- The BIC Atlantis Exact for slower writing on smoother paper
(The links above lead to Officeworks product pages. I receive no commission or anything for these links, their just pens I like)
Step 5: Learn Traditional Calligraphy to Spruce up Your Handwriting Abilities
I know this seems counter-intuitive. It resembles I’m telling you to run prior to you can stroll. However, I saw vast enhancements with my hand lettering after I studied calligraphy. Knowing how to form letters generally can assist you to comprehend consistency and anatomy.
My recommendation: find out fundamental strokes of brush calligraphy.
Get a calligraphy book that isn’t for pointed-pen calligraphy (I advise Calligraphy for Dummies) and a $1 grid structure book or cheap graph paper. Studying this book assisted me decrease (extremely essential!!) and focusing on consistent letterforms.
Step 6: Lastly, Practice. Practice. Practice.
I can’t stress how important routine practice is! If sprucing up your handwriting seems like a chore to you, try to make it enjoyable:
- Journal daily– with pen and paper
- Compose letters to your good friends (since truly, everybody would enjoy receiving a handwritten letter!)
- Draw up your grocery list as nicely as possible
- Leave handwritten notes in your kids’ lunches
- Even sketch notes when listening to a podcast or viewing a YouTube video
- Start a bullet journal
Even if you can’t dedicate time to daily practice, make it a point to compose neatly for whatever you write down i.e. notes at work or school, filling out forms or signup sheets, etc.
All in all, decrease, focus, and work to find the handwriting style that is finest for you, together with your favoured pen type and paper combination.